Inheritance
by PragmaticHominid
Summary: Erik and Charles attempt to survive and to keep their child safe in a world overrun by zombies.
1. Chapter 1

**Inheritance**

**I.**

Erik stepped down from the armored bus, the weight of the baby carrier on his back deceptively light for something bearing the weight of half his world.

The baby's green-haired head lolled against her shoulder. Charles had gently guided her into a restful sleep before Erik took her from the vehicle, and she would stay that way until this brief and dangerous supply run was over with.

It was for Lorna's own protection; undo noise might have drawn the zombies down on them all.

The soles of Erik's tough leather boots crunched in the gravel. They were an important safety measures, those boots, and had saved his life more than once; sometimes the infected would lash out from beneath cars or other low hiding places to latch onto a person's ankle, and when that happened you wanted to be wearing boots that they couldn't easily bite through.

He was vigilant. Erik had always been a watchful person, but now he was never off, never let his guard down or his concentration flag. He was never not on the lookout, though the danger was much less now than it had been.

It took a few minutes to unfold the wheelchair and for Charles to transfer himself into it. There was a risk associated with the delay, with the exposure of being out in the open of the parking lot, but it was worth it; splitting up wasn't an option. There weren't as many infected around as there had been two years earlier, at the peak of the crisis, but it only took one to bite you.

They watched each other's backs as they crossed the parking lot. Charles's pistol hung holstered across his chest, in easy reach. He used an athletic wheelchair, light and slim and very speedy - he had outpaced more than one zombie with that chair, Erik knew.

Inside the store, most of the goods were still on the shelves - the plague had apparently spread too quickly here for there to be a run on supplies. They made their way cautiously toward the canned foods.

Erik waited for Charles to draw his pistol before leaning his own rifle against a shelf and getting down to business. Charles covered him while Erik filled the bag strapped to the back of the wheelchair with nappies, powdered formula, cans of soup and half a dozen other necessities. The baby slept quietly in her carrier.

They moved on, and when they turned down the end of the aisle, Charles came to a sudden stop. "Erik," he said softly.

Erik had been looking for movement, had been so hyper focused on catching movement that it took him a moment longer than Charles to notice the message, written in on the wall in black paint.

The foot-high letters read: SECURE LOCATION: NO ONE HUMAN TURNED AWAY.

Below that, smaller print spelled out a series of directions to take a specific series of roads to a specific location in a specific city.

_The distinction being drawn here is between the infected and the rest of us, _Charles told Erik, projecting the thought because speaking out loud was a hazard.

Erik knew he was almost certainly correct. The five years following the events in Cuba, there had been rumors in the press as to the existence of Mutants, but most people didn't give it much credit. The topic was the purview of conspiracy theorists; Mutants were only a serious consideration to the types of people who believed in aliens and cryptids... _And,_ Erik thought ruefully to himself, _the potentiality of a zombie apocalypse. _

To Charles he thought back, _We'll check it out. _And why not? They always did. They'd followed half a dozen such signs over the past few months. What they found was always more or less the same, which was to say more or less what was everywhere else - Death.

In the beginning, in the face of the spreading carnage, Erik had counseled himself that at least Mutants would be able to ride the thing out. He'd told himself that his people - this new race of survivors, with all their power and talent - would make it through, even if the humans in their entirety surcumbed to the plague. Erik had always expected Mutants to inherit the Earth. He would not have wished for it to be on this terms, but he may have come to accept it.

However, aside from himself and Charles, he has yet to see any evidence to support the premise that Mutants had fared better than humans. Too much, in fact, that contradicted it.

When the crisis had begun, nearly two years earlier, Erik and Charles had been on what Raven referred to jokingly (mocking Charles's accent when she said it) as one of their "little trysts." They had been hiding from their respective responsibilities in an upscale hotel in downstate New York, trying to make something work even though they knew it probably wouldn't, and by mutual consent they had tried for the school first when things started to unravel.

It was better not to think about what they found when they finally battled their way through the swarms of frightened evacuees and the military checkpoints and the swarms of shambling corpses and made it to Westchester.

**II. **

The Beast (one could not think of that fanged and slabbering shell as Hank) had pursued Charles and Erik for three days after they left the desolated school behind.

It followed them specifically. There was nothing like conscious thought driving the creature - none of the infected were capable of thought, they were vacant spaces, howling hollows - but Hank's wonderful, clever brain had retained a sort of malicious animal cunning, and he had hunted them with drooling deliberation.

When the opportunity to take a shot eventually presented itself, Charles didn't hesitate.

Nothing much better was waiting for them at the Brotherhood's HQ. Charles told himself that none of them were suffering - that there was nothing left in the dead that suffer, nor anything that held grudges or that hated. There was nothing at all remaining of the people who the dead had been, and therefore none of what happened there was at all personal; she had not been out to get him.

Usually, his conscious mind could remember this, but dreams were another matter.

Things started slipping. It seemed to Charles that he was being pushed to the brink of madness by the yawning mental silence that underpinned the mindless groaning of the ambulatory dead that at all times surrounded them, all that sound and fury that signified nothing.

Erik had gone into emotional lock-down. Charles could perceive nothing about his thoughts beyond the immediate concerns of minute-to-minute survival. He rarely spoke, and then his words were only variations on the same theme as his thoughts: Food. Water. Shelter. Safety.

They did not talk about Raven, nor any of the others.

They talked about almost nothing, and so Charles's imagination filled the void, and the things that his imagination came up with were neither kind nor pretty.

Charles decided that Erik had decided that he was dead weight, and that sooner rather than later Erik would leave him behind.

He got angry about it and then he started a fight about it. Erik was mystified by the accusations at first, then he was both annoyed and wounded. And when Charles did not accept his terse and affronted reassurances, he became angry too.

It was quite a while before they were both shouted out, and in the ensuing argument they flung at one another every fear and hurt and feeling of mistrust that had built up between them, not just since the crisis had begun but over the entire course of years that they had known one another.

And things had been much better after that. It was like lancing a boil to let out the infection, and when Erik started crying first Charles no longer felt as though getting some sort of emotional response out of him counted as a victory, as he might have an hour earlier.

Charles started crying too, and after that was mostly out of the way, they talked things out - _really talked_ about what had happened and what they were going to do next, for the first time since the emergency sirens had roused them from sleep in their hotel room weeks earlier.

It was good. They talked things out and gotten the facts in the open and squared away, and they made a plan, and then they fucked, and that was good, too, because it helped them remember that they weren't dead even if everyone else seemed to be.

And it was good for another reason, too, and that was because Charles was almost positive that that was the night that they started the baby.

So far as secondary mutations went, male pregnancy wasn't unheard of but it had never occurred to either of them that it might happen to Erik.

They were happy, once they worked out what was going on.

For a while, Erik believed that he was simply experiencing inexplicable weight gain, but once they understood there was no question but that they were happy. Erik, who took the matter in stride as another manifestation of his mutantness and thus an innately wonderful occurrence - practically _glowed_ with happiness.

Charles was happy, too, but he worried terribly about complications.

They had very little idea what to expect, after all, and no one else to fall back on should things go badly. Charles felt that he was in over his head in an entirely new and frightening way, and he was even more desperate than before to find other survivors.

Erik was against it. He was against the risks of further travel and against the idea of entrusting themselves to some theoretical band of survivors who - human or Mutant - might not have understood.

They went to ground instead.

The isolated CIA bunker from which Erik had rescued Emma Frost five years previously was nearby. They decided it was worth a shot.

They found the facility to be empty, aside from a handful of bodies that had the common decency to stay where they had died. The prevalence of suicides among CIA agents in the wake of the plague gave Charles the suspicion that they may have had something to do with it... He wondered if the thing might have had to do with Mutants... some sort of anti-Mutant measure - a virus or a drug - that had somehow gone terribly wrong? He couldn't say, and he decided against looking for answers.

Erik and Charles cleaned things up and laid in supplies - ammo and nappies figured prominently - and before long they had a fortress home that was quite pleasant as well as secure.

There were zombies on the other side of the perimeter fence, but Charles couldn't hear them from behind the sturdy concrete walls of the building. Sometimes he almost forgot they were there.

Erik's due date - calculated as best as they could - drew closer and closer, and after awhile it became apparent to Charles that there was going to be a problem... Put very frankly, he could conceive of no way of the baby _getting out _when the time came.

Erik had insisted from the beginning that there wouldn't be any trouble, that there was no reason to worry because nature would take care of things.

He stuck to this story until he was almost eight months along, when he calmly walked into the kitchen and sat a stainless steel case onto the table. Erik opened the case with a flick of his wrist and revealed a gleaming set of surgical instruments.

Charles had never seen the box before. It had by then been several months since they had left the facility, so he knew Erik had gotten the case shortly after learning he was pregnant, or else had found it somewhere on the premises. Either way, he supposed Erik had been thinking about the problem more than he let on.

He took a deep breath, steeling himself, then looked up at Erik. "How do you propose we manage this?" he asked.


	2. Chapter 2

**I.**

The zombie got between them, for all their caution.

They were passing the entrance to the supermarket's stockroom. Erik walked point, the barrel of his rifle held steadily out ahead of him. Charles was following, but he had paused, glancing back at the directions on the wall to make certain that he had committed all the details to memory, and by consequence he had fallen a few yards behind Erik. Erik would not be aware that he had stopped until later.

It all happened very quickly.

The zombie came through the crash doors. It stood for a moment, almost as though in indecision, before lurching toward Erik.

Erik did not see this. He sensed the movement of metal as the PCV doors' hinges flexed, heard the doors open and the sound of dragging feet. And then there was a smell.

There was a grave smell and Charles shouting, "Erik - behind you!" and Erik felt stiff cold fingers groping at the back of his neck. They tore at the baby backpack, trying to take Lorna away from him.

There wasn't time to turn, no time to bring the gun around.

The barrel of his rifle was pointed in the wrong direction. Erik fired anyway.

He pulled the trigger and caught the bullet as it came out the barrel, turning it in the air, causing it veer around and come back in his own direction. Erik sent the bullet blindly over his shoulder, and heard the impact as it shattered through flesh and bone. The clutching fingers loosened.

Erik spun around and fired into the zombie again - then again and again. His rational mind understood that it was already dead - absolutely dead - but he was angry and did not care.

Lorna was howling. The sound of the gun had shattered the deep sleep that Charles had placed her in, and now she was _screamin_g, and Erik couldn't see - couldn't see if -

His hands shook as he clawed at the strap that held up the baby backpack. Erik almost fumbled as he took her down from his shoulders, but he caught the carrier as it began to fall, holding it and the baby inside it steady with his ability.

"Erik," Charles said, his voice steady. "Give her to me."

Later, Erik would chew him out out for falling behind, though it had only been the smallest of mistakes, a few seconds of justifiable carelessness. Once they were back in the bus, Erik would rage and rage about what almost-nearly-could have happened for nearly half an hour, his voice low because Lorna was asleep in the bed at the rear of the bus, and Charles could let him.

Now though, words stuck in Erik's throat. He handed the baby over to Charles helplessly, without a word.

**II.**

Charles took Lorna and drew her into his lap. She clung to his arm.

She was clean - none of the fluids from the zombie had slashed back on her. Her green eyes were clear, if bright with with tears.

He thought that everything was alright - that everything was going to be okay - but he checked carefully.

Charles smiled at Lorna and gave her a slight emotional push, releasing a little beam of biochemical sunlight into her brain, and she stopped screaming. She loosened her hold on his arm and leaned back to smile at him too, a big silly grin. He worried about using telepathic suggestions, that he might damage her somehow with them - give her a neurosis, maybe - and he avoided it whenever he could.

"Owie?" he inquired, careful to keep the tremor out of his own voice, and she shook her head in an emphatic no. He spread her hands open anyway, checking their back and the palms and the webbing between her fingers for scratches or bites, for the smallest abrasions. He checked up her arms and under her shirt and at the junction where the bottoms of her pants legs and the tops of her socks left half an inch of exposed skin.

"Reload your gun," Charles told Erik while he checked, and though he didn't lift his eyes he could hear Erik fumbling with the weapon.

Charles said nothing of how he had felt the bullet wiz directly past his ear after it exited the zombie. It was a fact that he hoped to be able to keep to himself, since it would benefit Erik not in the slightest to know about it.

Erik was not trustworthy around guns. If Charles had not already known as much from personal experience, he would have worked it out very shortly after the crisis began. Erik panicked around guns, and what made it so much worse was that he refused to admit to this, even to himself.

Charles didn't like guns - had never liked guns, even before his own injury - and he liked the idea of Erik mixed with guns even less, but there were no better options. In the movies, people fought zombies with blunt weapons all the time, with no concern for the dangers of coming into close contact with something that infectious. In real life, nothing beat the stopping-power of a decent gun. Sometimes, Erik would wield found metal items, but that was not as dependable and using his ability too frequently could be draining.

So, guns. Guns were how one stayed alive in the world they were living in.

He finished looking over Lorna, and tousled her mop of green hair. "She's fine," Charles said. He smiled up at Erik. "Really, Eirk, she is."

Erik took Lorna from him and put her back in the baby carrier. "Let's get back to the bus," he said.

Charles nodded and wheeled after him, remembering the first time he had held Lorna.


	3. Chapter 3

**I. **

For Charles, there was an unreal quality to the days leading up to the delivery, but that sense of unreality made the situation no less frightening - a point that might have been applied to everything about their existence post-plague, he supposed. He felt as though he was sleepwalking his way toward the edge of a cliff.

Erik had gone into emotional lock-down again. He still got up every morning and went through the day's tasks effectively - as effectively as his advanced condition allowed, in any case - but he seemed to think little and feel less.

Charles understood that it was Erik's way of staying on his feet - of surviving, when things were hard and survival was difficult. It was easier for Charles to understand this now than it had been in the past, but he still could not help resenting it sometimes.

Erik, at least, seemed to be certain about what was coming and of their ability to handle it. But Charles couldn't help looking for an escape.

He clung to the hope that nature might still supply a solution. Perhaps, he thought wildly, Erik would grow a vigina just in time. But Mother Nature had apparently decided to be decidedly stringy: She had allowed Erik, though some quirk of evolution, to conceive, but had provided no way for the baby to be born nor for them to feed him or her.

They had laid in a large stockpile of infant formula. Charles spent a lot of time dreading the possibility that the baby might be allergic to it - that happened sometimes, he knew - but he tried to keep the fear in check, since there was nothing that could be done about it. He knew that it was not a rational fear, but he couldn't help it.

Charles didn't know how Erik knew that the time had come. Did the baby somehow communicate it to him, perhaps by moving in some new way, or had Erik simply decided it had been long enough? He suspected the latter, but that seemed fair enough - Charles himself was flying blind, and he supposed there was no one else in the world who had a better idea about how to handle the situation than Erik.

The two of them had discussed what they were each going to do - or rather, Erik had explained to Charles what his role would be, and Charles had accepted it since he didn't have any better ideas himself and because Erik demanded nothing less. Erik was answering to the dictates of stubborn, unyielding instinct, and brooked no arguments.

Point of fact: Erik insisted on doing the knife work himself, so Erik got to do the knife work.

Charles had some experience manipulating the pain centers of his own brain - it was a talent he had worked in earnest to develop, during his recovery after Cuba - but he hadn't tried the same trick on another person until Erik had suggested that he learn.

Erik had modified the operating table so Charles could reach across it from his chair, and consequently it was set lower to the ground than was the norm. The instrument tray was also set at Charles' level, though they both hoped he wouldn't have to use any of the tools found there; his hands were unsteady and he had no experience with this type of thing. Though lacking in formal training, Erik had, in the very least, done work as a field medic during his career as a Mutant terrorist.

Erik stripped and put on a hospital gown. He laid down on the table and he sterilized his hands and then he sterilized his abdomen and then he sterilized his hands again. Charles caught the betadine-stained wipes in a steel container as Erik finished with them and put them to the side.

"You ready for this?" Erik asked.

"Not even slightly," Charles said.

Erik's smile was ghastly. "Let's get started," he said. "I want to see my baby."

There was no point in reliving it - the first time had been difficult enough. The main thing, Charles thought, when the stress and fear of that bloody afternoon tried to reassert itself on his memory, was that there was no doubt in the world but that it had all been worth it. Charles would have known that Erik believed this even if he hadn't been a telepath. To this day Charles believed it himself whenever he looked at her, as strongly as he had believed it the first time he held her.

He'd taken her from Erik, folding her into a sterile towel, and she cried when he took her. Charles cut the cord and toweled her dry, discovering as he did the emerald tint of her hair.

The baby quieted down after a minute or two, and Charles cradled her against him and sat in silence while Erik resolutely got down to the business of sewing up his own incision. Charles did not speak for fear that any interruption might slow Erik down or cause him to make an error. They didn't have a lot of room for error; their blood types were not compatible and so if Erik lost too much blood a transfusion would be out of the question.

Charles did not stare. He focused on keeping a firm handle on the pain receptors in Erik's brain. Erik was working quickly, but they weren't out of the woods yet. He could tell that Erik was starting to get light-headed from the blood loss, and there was very little that Charles could do to control such a physiological problem.

Still, they made it through alright, after all.

Erik kept at it for just as long as he absolutely needed to - which was, Charles thought with admiration, so much further than anyone else might have gone. The floating needle executed a final stitch and a pair of scissors came up to snip the end of the string, and then both clattered noisily onto the instrument table and Erik's mind went from a foggy gray to pitch black.

He stayed asleep for a long time, and Charles sat beside him, the baby cradled in his arms. She slept too. Charles watched over them both while they slept, and did not mind being awake, though it had been a terribly long day.

Erik asked for the baby as soon as he woke up. He was pale from the loss of blood and his hands were unsteady, but his eyes were clear. Charles passed her to him carefully, and Erik cradled the baby against his chest. He ran his thumb over the crown of her head, smoothing down the wisps of bright green hair.

"A girl," Charles said helpfully.

"Like I told you," Erik said, sounding exhausted but terribly smug, and Charles supposed that he had. Erik had insisted from the start that the baby would be a girl. He wasn't in possession of any special knowledge in that regard, Charles knew, but he had felt absolutely certain about it and had been terribly stubborn on the point.

They had moved to the matter of a name when Erik drifted back to sleep. This had been a hot topic of debate for almost as long as they had known Erik was pregnant, a reliable topic of discussion to fill the often monotonous days. Charles was pretty sure that he would be allowed to win this one, which would be a welcomed change.

Things went well after that.

Their problems - big and little and potentially deadly - did not go away. They were still alone and surrounded by a sea of ravenous corpses. They still bickered, and sometimes each felt entirely sick of each other. Lost friends and family still came to visit in the night, and even when the dreams were pleasant they still stung in the light of day.

But Charles tried to make the best of the situation and things did go well.

Erik, whose mind had always been consumed by Big Ideas and who had always been devoted to Big and Dramatic Actions, seemed content enough with his secluded little family in their fortified little home.

And Lorna was almost always happy, since she hadn't had time to learn the many reasons why she shouldn't be. She was not a demanding child and it was very easy to keep her happy.

It took Erik a while to get back on his feet. He had lost a lot of blood, and for a while that left him feeling weak and constantly chilly. Charles lived in fear of infection, but the incision healed without issue - Erik had done good work.

The course of days stretched on.

Lorna grew.

**II.**

They stayed at the CIA base for more than a year after Lorna was born.

It wasn't bad there. The above-ground buildings were spacious and were surrounded by a lot of green space that was in turn surrounded by two ten-foot-tall barbed wire fences.

These fences kept the zombies out very effectively, and even if they had been breached it would have been easy for them to retreat to the underground bunker. But Erik's maternal instincts were as strong as his well-learned tendency toward vigilance, and shortly after Lorna was born he became dissatisfied with the compound's existing security structures.

He built a new wall to augment the perimeter, this one made of solid steel gathered from nearby cars. The wall grew every day, smooth and gleaming. He meant to top it with machine guns when he was finished but it was never quite tall enough to suit him; he always wanted to add just a little more.

Soon, it was high enough from the ground that you couldn't see the zombies on the other side, nor the ever increasing mound of discarded plastic auto components. That was good, because Lorna was getting to the age where she was starting to take serious notice of the world around her.

Erik didn't want her to see those things out there. He didn't want her to be frightened by them and he didn't want her to accept them as being normal. He wanted to protect her from the knowledge of the way things were, though he knew that he could not.

But the thing was, lately it seemed as though the way things were might be changing.

When Erik and Charles had first come to the compound in the early months of the crisis, the area had apparently been free of zombies. A few mornings later, they had awoken to find nearly two hundred moaning outside of their gates. Erik used his ability to drop them all methodically from the right side of the fence, then pulled the bodies by the change in their pockets into a pile and burned them.

Two days later, another group arrived. The things seemed to move in herds, and apparently were attracted to living people. In the ensuing months new groups would arrive regularly, and each time Erik would deal with them the same way.

Only, around the time Lorna started to crawl, the zombies began to make their appearances much less frequently. They came in smaller groups now, too, and they seemed more sluggish than before. They were rotting on their feet and Erik was terribly curious as to how this process was taking place in more populated areas.

That was probably the seed that got him thinking about leaving, though at the time it was only a thought to chew on.

In the meantime, he and Charles tried to keep busy. They both read a lot. Erik had started a garden to supplement their diet of prepackaged foods. He would have liked to have chickens - his mother had kept chickens, when he was very small - but so far as he had been able to tell the chickens were all dead or else in hiding.

He hadn't had many chances to check. Since Lorna was born, Erik had made exactly three supply runs, traveling into a nearby town in an armored van he had militarized himself. Each time, the trips had been a great source of anxiety and contention between himself and Charles.

Charles did not want Erik leaving the compound by himself. Erik didn't like the idea of going without backup, either, but could see no better course of action. Their only other options were to take Lorna along or to leave her behind alone, neither of which were acceptable.

There was no good answer to the puzzle, and the difficulty and the high stakes of it made them both angry. They went back and forth on the point, rejecting and then returning to and again rejecting a dozen different plans, each indecisive and each frustrated with the other's indecision.

The first time Erik left, he simply went without Charles's permission, but he now he was frightened to ever try that kind of stunt again. The trip had gone fine but Charles had met him with recriminations that drew heavily on Cuba followed by weeks of icy silence.

Erik felt mistreated but so did Charles. There was no way to win it and Erik resented that this somehow became his fault.

Charles was more resigned the second time; they were running low on baby formula, and since baby formula had for some reason become a nervous obsession to Charles (Erik supposed there were worst things he could worry about) it was easier to convince him that there was nothing else for it. That trip had worked out fine as well, though the local grocery store was beginning to run dangerously low on some necessities.

The third time... the third time Erik's guard had been down - just the slightest bit - since it had been so long since he had seen a mobile zombie and because he had a clear line of sight in almost every direction, and the thing had grabbed at him from a sewer vent while he was carrying the last load out to the van. It pulled his foot down through the vent, and he shouted and fell down sprawling on his ass and felt his ankle bend a way it wasn't supposed to.

The thing in the sewer still had him and he roared and pulled free, his ankle screaming in pain. Erik scuttled backwards on his butt, watching with wide eyes as the rotting hands reached up through the grate, fingers wiggling and clutching at the empty air. The moaning that came from the sewer had a strange, echoing quality.

Erik tore his eyes away from the hands and clawed his pant leg up. There was blood. His skin had been torn and there was blood and he could not say with any certainty if the zombie had done that with its teeth or its nails or if he had scratched himself on the sewer grate.

He stayed away from the compound for two days, waiting to see if the infection would take him. Erik did not dare to go close enough to explain the situation to Charles; he had lost his helmet somewhere along the way and he was terribly frightened that Charles would use his ability to force him to come inside the walls. Charles had shown some aptitude for making hard choices over the last year and a half, but Erik didn't trust him that far.

When he was sure that he would not become a threat to his family he finally went home. Charles was waiting for him in the yard when Erik made his slow way down from the van. He'd messed his leg up pretty badly in the fall and he felt like a counterfeit and a whiner, limping in front of Charles, though he couldn't help it. The old surge of guilt came back, like bile in the back of his throat, and he couldn't help that either.

The baby was in Charles's lap and Erik wanted to ask for her but he didn't quite dare. Charles's face was a brick wall. "I was quite certain you were dead," he told Erik.

"Yes," Erik said, matching the flatness of Charles' tone. "I suppose you must have been." He waved one hand at the side of his head indifferently. "Just take it," he said, since that was easier than trying to explain.

Having the facts and his motive did nothing to change Charles' demeanor. "Things can't go on like this," he said.

"What... isn't working?" Erik said. He was gripped by the sudden certainty that Charles was breaking up with him again. It was a silly idea - given the situation they were pretty much stuck together, for better or worse - but he couldn't shake it.

"We can't stay here any longer. It feels safe, but it's a death trap in the long term. What do you think would have become of Lorna and I if you had been killed out there by yourself?"

"You can look after yourself quite proficiently -" Erik started.

"Nonsense," Charles cut in. "One man alone with an infant? There's ten miles between here and the nearest store, and I can't drive. We would have our choice of starving behind these walls or becoming meat on the road." Erik winced.

"We need to find new people, somehow. For Lorna's sake - in case something should happen to one or the both of us, we need to find new people. We need to leave."

Erik opened his mouth to argue, but Charles had already turned around and was wheeling rapidly away.

After that, Charles would not drop the idea. He was not so cold about it as he had been the first time - it seemed that he wanted to avoid making a fight of it, to win on his argument's merits - but he had a hundred reasons why they should leave.

Erik had won so many arguments in the months leading up to Lorna's birth. It was time, he supposed, to make some concessions. And when Erik took an honest evaluation of himself, he found that he too wanted very badly to move on - the cabin fever was enough to drive a person mad.

So that was how they ended up back on the road. And now, in the evening after the near-miss in the grocery store, the two of them sat together in the front of the armored van, Charles's hand resting lightly on Erik's thigh, while Lorna slept peacefully in the rear.

"We had so many ideas about how things were going to be, didn't we?" Charles said, as though to himself. He was looking out the window and Erik couldn't read his expression.

Erik didn't answer. The road ran out ahead of them and maybe there were survivors waiting for them at the end of the line and maybe there weren't, but Erik kept driving.


End file.
